Before we start, let’s have some fun with math! That’s a sentence I never thought I’d say…

The first season of The Rings of Power cost approximately $715 million to make.[1] That means that Amazon spent a little less than 10% of Somalia’s GDP to buy 8 episodes of mediocre television. (Honestly, I’m surprised by how well piracy pays.)

I’ve made the executive decision to shorten House of the Dragon’s abbreviation to ‘HoD’ instead of ‘HotD’ after a loyal reader pointed out the possibly-erotic implications of the latter. Just roll with it.

Cast & Characters:

Let’s start with The Rings of Power. By the end of the season, the most likeable character was Sauron.

Fucking Sauron, dude. That’s basically Fantasy Hitler.

It’s a little impressive that the showrunners managed to make Sauron reasonably likeable…but I’m not sure they were trying to make him the most likeable character in the story. Many of the other protagonists – Elrond, Bronwyn, Arondir, the Numenoreans, etc. – are, at best, perfectly adequate. Galadriel, the ostensible “hero” of the story, is a snide, unrepentant dingus whose presence onscreen can best be likened to an unwelcome crotch rash.

House of the Dragon also features a bunch of bell-ends; the difference between it and The Rings of Power is that HoD’s dickheads are interesting characters that evolve and interact in compelling ways (although, unfortunately, their family tree is more interconnected than the Habsburgs). This is a phenomenon I like to refer to as “the Jaime Lannister effect”. The show’s actors turn in good performances across the board, and left me chuckling and/or wincing at the appropriate times. The show’s time jumps become more infrequent in the season’s latter half, which gives us time to become acquainted with the actors portraying the “grown-up” versions of younger characters; a particular standout is Ewan Mitchell’s Aemond, a smirking, dagger-twirling bully who also happens to ride a dragon the size of a skyscraper. This isn’t to say that other characters like Paddy Considine’s Viserys, Matt Smith’s Daemon or Eve Best’s Rhaenys get short shrift: all of them turn in powerful performances as the season draws to a close. I would be remiss to not also mention Emma D’Arcy’s Rhaenyra; although she’s given fewer scene-stealing moments than the aforementioned, D’Arcy does a great job with what she’s given, capturing Rhaenyra’s steely determination with a level of panache that makes you forget she only started portraying the character halfway through the season.

Winner: House of the Dragon

Script & Story:

Are you…are you serious? One of these series is a strong adaptation of a fictional history book (that’s weirdly fun to read); the other is the most insultingly pointless desecration of a cultural touchstone since the Robocop remake.

Rings of Power goes out of its way to be simultaneously predictable and preposterous; many of the show’s plot developments are so serendipitously dumb that the viewer is left oddly impressed, as if they’d just witnessed a dog driving a train. When the show isn’t relying on insane levels of coincidence, it stumbles into plot holes big enough to fit a medium-to-large-sized civilian dirigible.

House of the Dragon, on the other hand, captures the feeling of Game of Thrones’ early-season political intrigue in a way that makes me feel like it’s 2011 all over again. Dragon’s use of time jumps slows down in the latter half of the season, allowing the viewer to get settled in and appreciate the way the stories’ two primary factions are coalescing. The show seems to want us to root for Rhaenyra’s faction, the Blacks, seeing as their opponents, the Greens, are incredibly scheme-oriented and, for lack of a better term, backstabbey – but the prominent members of both the Blacks and the Greens are skillfully painted in varying shades of grey, so rooting for the Greens wouldn’t make you an insane person (just a strange one). By the same token, going all-in on Team Black is a morally dicey proposition– and the mental gymnastics required to be fully on-board with one side over the other are only going to get trickier (assuming the show follows the story from Fire and Blood and Daemon has a certain dynamic duo pay a visit to [SPOILERS]).

Winner: House of the Dragon, by a fucking mile. It’s like Stephen Dorff having a footrace against Stephen Hawking.

Sets & Costumes:

We’ve gotten to see a bit more variety in terms of setting as House of the Dragon has progressed, but it’s still (in my mind) mildly hindered by our preexisting familiarity with the story’s primary locations.

As I mentioned in the previous Review Showdown, I was pleased (but not enamored) with the costumes on Rings, and the sets were, well, what you’d expect from a production worth more than Jesus’ own boxer shorts: at their worst they’re impressive but bland, and at their best, they elicit a mumble of, “huh, that’s neat.”

Call me a sucker for shiny new things if you want, but Rings of Power edges this one out by virtue of being shiny and new (in terms of television, at least).

Winner: The Rings of Power, but just barely.

Soundtrack & Effects:

At the end of the day, both shows wound up presenting somewhat forgettable soundtracks, which is a shame – honestly the only song I can remember from either show is Dragon’s theme, which is just a slow version of Game of Thrones’. This may or may not be a function of my booze-addled brain, but I don’t think I’m that far off.

That said, both shows did a good job when it came to effects, both practical and computer-generated; Rings’ planetoid-sized budget bought it a few big CGI moments, and HoD had some great dragon-centric shots, particularly toward the end of the season.

Winner: Draw.

Lighting:

Yeah, I put this section in just so I could bitch and moan about how dark House of the Dragon was during some of its later episodes – particularly in Episode 7 (“Driftmark”). The only way that shit could have been darker was if it was filmed in Helen Keller’s basement.

Even when Elrond was exploring the darkest depths of Durin’s Grundle or whatever the fuck the dwarves named those poorly-planned tunnels, you could see what was going on! HBO seems to want to make Dragon’s lighting a ‘me’ problem, but my windowless subterranean lair and eye-scalding brightness settings would tend to argue otherwise.

Winner: The Rings of Power.

Miscellaneous:

To HoD’s everlasting credit, the only dick that got chopped onscreen was the one I called out in the premiere. That’s great! It was also nice to see HBO spend less of their budget on scenes depicting egregious instances of medieval sexual assault and instead spend the money on, you know, dragons (and other more wholesome fare).

…of course, they did spend a decent chunk of change on several childbirth scenes of varying gruesomeness. By my count, there were four such scenes this season – three of which ended with a dead baby. I’m not in the business of comparing dead babies to sexual assault,[2] but, like, god damn, dude. You could just not do either, you know?

As for Rings of Power? That show was dull as shit. The hobbit knockoffs were pretty loathsome, from a societal perspective, so…congrats to the writing team for making hobbits suck, I guess?

Winner: House of the Dragon, despite the fact that it features more dead baby dolls than your average protest outside Planned Parenthood.

Overall Winner: It’s not The Rings of Power, that’s for fucking sure. Like, going into this, did you ever think it would be? I might’ve made it interesting with the arbitrary categories, but this was the most predictable outcome since the Whiskey Rebellion.  

Do yourself a favor: watch House of the Dragon, fast forward through the dick-chopping and maternal-mortality scenes, and thank me later for telling you to avoid The Rings of Power like it’s a cannonball made of hot shit.

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[1] https://www.distractify.com/p/rings-of-power-budget-per-episode

[2] “Oh, no, what’s he going to say?” you wondered. Consider yourself punk’d.